Context

“Art’s about life and it can’t really be about anything else … there isn’t anything else.”[1]

The ‘Biopsy’ series takes as its subject the results of biopsies conducted on diseased cells. The images are extracted from science photo libraries, then inkjet or silkscreen-printed onto canvas before being worked on by the artist with paint and collage. The titles derive from each biopsy’s complete digital name.

The attractive colours of the canvas surface are, on closer examination, variously furnished with broken glass, human hair, teeth, needles, pins, fish hooks and scalpel blades. Hirst previously addressed the conflict between dark subject matter and appealing visual image in ‘When Logics Die’ (1991). Of the pathology photographs used in these early mixed media works, he explains that they are: “completely delicious, desirable images of completely unacceptable and undesirable things”.[2] In a similar manner, the ‘Biopsy’ paintings “pull you in” with their colour and form “and then push you away” on the realisation of both their detail and subject.[3]